The launch of the Apple watch prompts Brad to remind us of the benefits of being future-friendly.

Once again, responsive design is not about “mobile”, “tablet”, and “desktop”. It’s about creating experiences meant to look and function beautifully on anything that can access the Web. We don’t know what gizmos will be sitting underneath Christmas trees two years from now, but there’s a damn good chance those gadgets will be able to access the Web.

Typeset In The Future is back with another cracking analysis. This time—following on from 2001 and Moon—we’ve got Alien.

In her final recorded message before hypersleep, Ripley notes that she is the sole survivor of the Nostromo. What she forgets to mention is that she has not once in the past two hours encountered any Eurostile Bold Extended.

Patty’s excellent talk on responsive design and progressive enhancement. Stick around for question-and-answer session at the end, wherein I attempt to play hardball, but actually can’t conceal my admiration and the fact that I agree with every single word she said.

A deeply thoughtful piece (as always) by Wilson, on the mindset needed for a sustainable way of working.

When we start with the assumption that optimizing for rapid, unbounded growth is a goal, we immediately narrow the possibility space. There are only so many choices we can make that will get us there. The same choices that made annual monoculture and the shopping mall the most efficient engines for short-term growth and profit are the same qualities that made them unsustainable in the long term.

There are more ways to scale than growth. There are more ways to deepen our impact than just reaching more people. What if we put just as much effort into scaling the impact of our work over time? Can we build digital products around sustainable systems that survive long enough to outlive us, that are purpose-built to thrive without our constant cultivation?

Jason writes about the closing of Ficly. This is a lesson in how to do this right:

We knew as soon as we decided to wind down Ficly that we wanted to provide users with continued access to their work, even if they couldn’t create more. We’re still working on some export tools, but more importantly, we’re guaranteeing that all original work on the site will live on at its current URL far into the future.

John peers behind the surface veneer of the web’s current screen-based setting:

The challenge for us as developers and designers for the web becomes less about screens and pixels and buttons and much more about how the web augments our lives, both actively and passively; how it makes us know ourselves and our homes and workplaces and environments better.

Here’s a dystopian vision of the web in ten years time, where professional developers are the only people able to publish on the web.

This is why it worries me when I come across very smart people who don’t seem to see a problem with the creation of web pages being taken out of the reach of any human being with an internet connection and a smattering of declarative languages—HTML, CSS—and into the hands of an elite minority of JavaScript programmers.

My interest in rich client-side apps has almost entirely reversed, and now I’m more interested in doing good ol’ server rendering with the occasional side of progressive enhancement, just like we did it in 2004.

This post resonates with me 100%.

Where will I be in 10 years? I don’t know. I hope I still will have some in-demand skills to pay the bills. But it feels like all I see are DevOps and JavaScript, and I know less and less every day about those things.

I think it’s a bit of a shame that Brett is canning his mobile-first device-detection library, but I totally understand (and agree with) his reasons.

There is a consensual hallucination in the market, that we can silo devices into set categories like mobile, tablet, and desktop, yet the reality is drawing these lines in the sand is not an easy task.

I really like these thoughts on the importance of design systems for the web. It’s not about providing a few perfect deliverables that won’t survive once they go live; it’s about designing for the unexpected, the unpredictable:

This is my favourite write-up of dConstruct so far. I love that way that, rather than simply giving a linear description, Laura weaves together the implicit strands that were running throughout the day — a very thoughtful, considered approach.

And how about this for an opening line:

After a weekend of reflection, I’ve decided that dConstruct 2012 had the best talks of any conference I’ve ever attended.

Curated well by the Clearleft team, its speakers are always intelligent, insightful, and on the whole, world-class. Pouring out insights through divergent thought, challenging norms and touting innovation.

It’s not enough to have the same Photoshopped image from Back To The Future trotted out every. single. year. …now you can pass this meme around every minute of every day of every month of every year. Thanks a lot, Seb.

Nielsen says his research is based on studies of hundreds of mobile experiences, and I don’t doubt it. But because he’s finding tons of poor mobile websites doesn’t mean we should punt on creating great, full-featured mobile experiences.

A rallying cry for a content-focused—rather than device-focused—approach to responsive design. Despite the awful title and occasionally adversarial tone, this article is making a very good point about being future friendly.

An interactive timeline where we, the wise crowd, can add our predictions (although the timeline for the past, showing important technological breakthroughs, is bizarrely missing Cooke and Wheatsone’s telegraph).

Brent Simmons follows up on that Dave Winer post with some future-friendly thoughts:

If I had to choose one or the other — if I had some crazy power but I had to wipe out either native apps or web apps — I’d wipe out native apps. (While somehow excluding browsers, text editors, outliners, web servers, and all those apps we need to make web apps.)

That’s not the case, though. Nothing has to get wiped out.

I think instead that we’ll see a more tangled future. Native apps will use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript more. Web apps will appear more often on smart phones as launchable apps.

A great, great reminder from Brad on the importance of progressive enhancement especially on mobile. There seems to be a real mindset amongst developers working on mobile sites that JavaScript is a requirement for building anything (and there’s a corresponding frustration with the wildly-varying levels of JavaScript support). It ain’t necessarily so!

This thread on whether HTML5 Boilerplate should include Respond.js by default (and whether the CSS should take a small-screen first approach) nicely summarises the current landscape for web devs: chaotic, confusing …and very, very exciting.

Publishers and designers have to start thinking about content at a more atomic level, not in aggregated issues. That’s how we already understand news as consumers, and we have to start thinking that way as publishers, too. This is why Flipboard, Instapaper, and other aggregators are so interesting: they give you one container for the whole universe of content, unbound to any one publisher.

Given some recent hand-wringing about the web as a “platform,” it seems appropriate to revisit this superb article from Ben. The specifics of the companies and technologies may have changed in the past year but the fundamental point remains the same:

Everything about web architecture; HTTP, HTML, CSS, is designed to serve and render content, but most importantly the web is formed where all of that content is linked together. That is what makes it amazing, and that is what defines it. This purpose and killer application of the web is not even comparable to the application frameworks of any particular operating system.

John reinforces the importance of universal access above the desire to build only for the newest shiniest devices:

Universality is a founding principle of the web. It is the manifesto the web has been built on, and I believe one of the key drivers of the almost unimaginable success of the web over these last two decades. We ignore that at the web’s peril.